Gadgetory

our own high-order huesemann took a look at koalas international flagship towards this half of 2015 the Huawei p8 the Chinese manufacturer has ascended a long way from its earlier products with help from a hefty Digital appetite in its home market not to mention swelling competition but while China reaches smartphone saturation companies over there are now looking for how to take the scene over to the west and thus North America always made the investment in Canadian headquarters but they've kept from releasing their best work onto our shelves how deep does Howie's Western footprint go with the Huawei p8 Lite I'm Jules Wong with pocket now let's find out in our video review we talk about glass sandwiches and plastic slabs in our industry it's funny here because Huawei opted to endow the p8 Lite with a plastic sandwich build top and bottom white layers arm at the bottom designed with a brushed metal motif in mind the glistening sparkles are a nice touch and furthermore look ma no fingerprints the chromed mid plate features a bit of that brushed texture too and contributes to the overall tactile feel you can pick it up scratch it up a bit and not worry up a storm it's not durable but it's resilient flipping the phone over one of my favorite quirks is the color notification LED on top right next to the proximity sensor what ever happened to those our US device shows off a five inch 720p LTPS LCD there's adequate saturation but it looks like sub pixels have been poorly arranged I mean look at this white screen sure it looks fine here but turn it this way and there's more of a blue tint back the other way around and we see a yellow hue representing the green and red elements blacks aren't as deep as even comparable LCDs can produce and the below average brightness and some major reflectivity issues also add on to the problem file this is not going to be a display for sunbathers or for sharing pictures and even beyond that forget pixel see here if a display can be as inconsistent in color production as this one can we'd have doubts about using it for prolonged anything media consumption gaming etc inside we're looking at the 64-bit Snapdragon 615 from Qualcomm but has become a pretty popular mid-range SOC there's two gigs of ram and a one-size-fits-all 16 gigabytes of internal storage only expandable by up to 32 gigabytes through micro sd though if you do go through with the extra space keep note that the p8 Lite is a dual SIM device in the US the case might be that a two carrier situation isn't necessary or comment at all but for all it's worth you should know that there's a dedicated micro SIM slot and a shared nano sim and micro sd card space there is an oddity in that you can clearly see the displays backlight illumination from the micro SIM slots keyhole which could signal number one that the backlights distance from the rest of the LCD is contributing to the visibility problems and number two there could be some instant trouble with water if it gets into the wrong places so this also isn't a beached phone watch out a stripped down version of emotion UI 3 on top of android 4.4.4 not lollipop has made its way to the west by stripped down I don't mean that the aesthetics that endless app screens and the software redundancies are gone they aren't but what is is the extensive theming capability and access to a theme store you're only given a few ways to spice up your homescreen and even fewer options to customize other interface aspects also gone are the knuckle gestures and pull up toggles and while one-handed usability is still here for a 5-inch phone and apparently only in the dialer it might not be as useful here the quick toggles are varied many and of course rearranging the notification shade contains allow or deny prompts for further pressures next to first-time notices occasionally you'll be notified of battery sapping apps which you can choose the close notifications and power savings can both be managed within the settings to this being the Flyway p8 Lite you'd like to think of this as mu I light take that for what you will a finger of glass serves as the head house for a 13 megapixel BSI sensor from Sony along with a single LED flash well it sounds kind of close to the p8 lights flagship sibling the light lacks oh is and doesn't use Sony's RGB W technology shooting with the p8 Lite again minding outdoor conditions with the display is pretty neat while we didn't take every bit of fun out of the diet phone there's an all focus mode which does what you would expect it to do a well-done panorama function and some other standard fancy stuff the pictures and selfies themselves range from all right to washed out hues trend cool and high contrast scenarios can really mess with the processing sometimes too hilarious detriment take a look at this HDR picture and this one as well and here's the exif data to prove that they're both different ones while it may be in a couple of cases that some terrible exposure interpretation happens the processing in general certainly cripples the camera's ability to take a decent picture especially when you might be relying on HDR for fairly common outdoor conditions lack of proper contrast and saturation also rule in low-light in 1080p video exposure is just as jumpy as the footage rolling shutter also contributes to the cons side and the mic pickup in the light breeze just doesn't seem to cut a film about you only the mic is picking boys up over sea breeze nice sea breeze of a v8 light can really chug on itself sometimes generally the typical light loads like social media browsing video watching and web reading are taken on just fine by the way the p8 Lite just like the p8 has a single 1 watt speaker on the bottom left of the device despite some deceiving grilles down there and yes it's just as easily muffled as it is I'm serious that may detract from your gaming experience as they take more of a toll anyways with symptoms of choppiness delayed tap recognition and most importantly power drain my initial assessment in battery life turned out to be just one side of the power coin after further testing i found out on lighter days the p8 managed superbly on standby going on 18 hours unplugged unfortunately it only manages about 4 hours of screen on time over any given time off the charger in some cases as low as 12 hours now keeping in mind that this is a twenty-two hundred million power battery this should be expected in a mid-range device but Huawei decided to promote how their LTPS display results in twenty to thirty percent better power efficiency in LCD technology LTPS is indeed better for battery life and other TFT materials but that on the whole is another discussion what doesn't die with me is the fact that the display can take up a whopping forty percent of the battery on any given day like other phones and when you end up having to crank the brightness up to the max when you're outside you can see how that effectively washes away any efficiency benefits testing the phone in Greater Boston on AT&T if found decent LTE speeds nearly everywhere we went there's a silver lining here and it comes to call quality which testers deemed better than average with adequate noise cancellation in louder environs but there are few silver linings to the Huawei p8 Lite that keep it from falling below our recommendation threshold especially when there are better options in the US market at the $250 price point right now so we find ourselves asking Kwame one of China's commercial achievements what business does it want to do in the West can it do better for a demanding marketplace should we even consider Huawei as a serious player here I didn't think we'd be asking these questions right here but given the circumstances with cell carriers changing the model of their business and ever-improving budget smartphones for more OMS shouldn't Huawei try harder our full text review of the four way p8 Lite will come shortly on pocket now calm in the meantime if you like what you just saw please thumb up this video and subscribe to pocket now on YouTube I'm Jules Wong at green point zero on Twitter I'll see you soon